There’s been a lot of hoo-ha in the media today about getting your seven a day, revised upwards from five (I’ve known a couple of years that five a day was always considered a ‘bare minimum’ – in other countries it’s ten, and I’m sure I read somewhere today that in Japan it’s recommended you eat seventeen portions of fruit and veg a day – eek!)

Now, I know a lot of people will be wondering how to eat seven portions of fruit and veg a day (and that should be mostly veg, by the way). I’m a terrible one for not eating enough fruit and veg – I’ve really slipped off the healthy wagon recently. Yet, while I was listening to Jeremy Vine debating the issue on Radio 2 this lunchtime, I found myself shouting at the radio that getting seven portions a day is really easy if you have a juicer. And then shouted at myself for not taking my own advice!

So, I popped off to the kitchen and knocked up this recipe. Rest assured it doesn’t taste as green as it looks – despite the unusual ingredients! It tastes mildly sweet, fairly orangey, very subtle and quite creamy (thanks to the orange pith). I promise you it’s delicious.

With this juice you’ll get the benefits of all the vitamins, minerals and live enzymes from the fruit and veg, but without having to sit there chewing on raw veg or add a portion of veg to your curry (we eat a lot of curries here so that’s how come I don’t seem to get enough veg). And to those of you who will argue that juice will deprive you of essential fibre, I say ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ – if you’re convinced you’ll be lacking in dietary fibre by drinking this juice, just carry on eating what you usually eat (which I trust is very high in dietary fibre) and have this juice as a supplement. There, easy peasy Like having your cake and eating it, but with fruit and veg instead of cake

Anyway – Big Seven – a juice recipe to help you get your 7-a-day:

1 orange

1 gala apple

2 florets cauliflower

1 handful kale

2 handfuls spinach

5 Brussels sprouts

1 large carrot

Peel the orange with a vegetable peeler, removing the outer skin but leaving as much white pith as possible on the fruit. Juice the orange slowly to extract as much juice as possible.

Add everything else to the juicer, sandwiching the leaves between the firmer ingredients. Juice into the same jug as the orange juice.

That’s it! Add ice if you want.

I know the Brussels sprouts are going to be a bit of a controversial ingredient – I promise you I couldn’t taste them in the juice, but if you’re that put off by them just replace them with a big chunk of broccoli stem instead

I’ve seen recipes online for chocolate spread before, but have never bothered trying to make them because they either used cacao powder, which I’d find too dry in this sort of recipe, or used the whole hazelnuts which (unless you have an amazing blender, which I don’t) would leave the spread too lumpy, or included ingredients I’m not too fond of (like agave).

So I got to pondering how I could make a healthy chocolate spread that would be totally smooth and the perfect consistency – it needed to be almost set at room temperature but still spreadable. And by jingo, I’ve done it! (Note: room temperature in my house is pretty cold, most of the time… if your house is warm, you’ll need to keep the spread in a cool cupboard or perhaps the fridge).

I say this chocolate spread is ‘almost’ raw because I’m not sure if the date syrup and malt extract are raw. Still, they’re healthier than refined sugar so I consider this to be a pretty healthy recipe, if not completely raw.

Blend the soaked hazelnuts with the water until you have as smooth a paste as possible. Pour the paste into a nut mylk bag and squeeze out as much milk (it’ll be similar to a light single cream in consistency) as possible, into a separate container. Rinse out the blender jug, blades and lid so that no nut remnants remain. You can use the nut meal in another recipe, like brownies or cakes – don’t throw it away

Meanwhile, put all the remaining ingredients into a glass mixing bowl and sit this in a pan of just-boiled water. Use enough water that it comes up the sides of the bowl, making the bowl warm. Stir regularly until all the ingredients have melted and mixed together.

Add the hazelnut cream and the chocolate mixture to the clean blender jug. Blend until everything’s fully combined and smooth. Pour the mixture into a lidded container, scraping out as much as possible from the jug using a spatula. Put the lid onto the container and leave at room temperature until set.

This raw chocolate spread has pretty much the same texture and consistency as commercial chocolate spreads – but without all the nasty ingredients. Try it spread on toasted, buttered rye bread for a tasty, healthy snack that feels naughty but is anything but!

Perfect spreading consistency – pretty much identical to commercial chocolate spreads but much better for you!

You’ve all no doubt heard of a cocktail called a Bloody Mary. It’s bloody delicious and just what the doctor ordered if you’re having a bit of a ‘morning after the night before’.

This delicious juice is called a Bloody Norah. Not because it contains either vodka or tomatoes, but because of its beautiful blood-red colour, and because ‘bloody Norah!’ is what you’ll exclaim when you taste it!

Makes 2 generous servings, so share it with a friend!

2 oranges, peeled but pith left on

1 gala apple

2 medium-large carrots

1 smallish beetroot (somewhere between a golf ball and a tennis ball in size)

10 medium strawberries

Juice the oranges slowly to extract as much juice as possible.

Juice the apple, carrots and beetroot.

Pour the juice into your blender jug with the strawberries. Blend until smooth.

As a child in the early 80s one of my favourite chocolate bars was Cabana – similar to a Bounty but with pieces of cherry mixed into the coconut centre, and with a layer of caramel on top of that, then covered in chocolate.

It wasn’t a long-lived product – apparently it was only on sale for four years before being withdrawn – but I’ve often yearned for a bite of that delicious sweet treat.

Since giving up ‘commercial’ chocolate and switching to raw, that craving for a Cabana bar hasn’t gone away; if anything, it’s become stronger, particularly in recent months after reminiscing with my friend Lesley about how delicious Cabana bars were (she was a fan, too). I swore I’d come up with a raw version, and here it is. It may not taste exactly like the original Rowntrees version, but it is both delicious and healthy, and definitely satisfies my Cabana bar cravings.

This recipe makes 24 bite-sized pieces. A quick tip: if you don’t have a food processor, use a heaped cup of desiccated coconut instead of coconut chips, and chop the cherries into small pieces with a sharp knife. You can mix the ingredients for the coconut layer together with a spoon, though if your honey isn’t quite runny enough you’ll have a bit of a workout in the process!

Break the coconut chips down in the food processor until they’re in tiny pieces. Remove from the food processor and put to one side.

Break the dried cherries down in the food processor until they’re in tiny pieces. Add the coconut and remaining ingredients back into the food processor with the cherries, and process until the mixture sticks together like a dough.

Press the mixture into the bottom of a 1lb loaf tin. Press down really firmly – you want the mixture to hold together well once it’s been cut.

Melt the cacao butter and coconut butter in a bain Marie (a glass bowl sitting in a pan of just-boiled water).

Stir in the remaining ingredients. The coconut sugar lends a slightly crunchy texture to the chocolate; if you’re not keen on a slightly crunchy texture, you can blend the ingredients in a blender instead.

To assemble:

Turn the loaf tin upside down and tap it on a chopping board or work surface to remove the contents.

Keeping the caramel layer on top and the coconut layer on the bottom, cut the slab into four strips lengthways, and cut each of those strips into six equally sized pieces (24 pieces in total).

Line a chopping board or baking sheet with greaseproof paper/baking parchment. Using a fork, dip each Cabana bar bite into the raw chocolate mixture, ensuring it’s fully coated (it helps to keep the bowl of raw chocolate mixture warm between dippings – keep it in the pan of water so the chocolate doesn’t set too soon). Put each chocolate-coated Cabana bar bite onto the lined board/baking sheet, keeping the caramel side uppermost.

When each piece has been fully coated and the chocolate is starting to set, spoon a little of the remaining chocolate mixture onto the top of each Cabana bite, ensuring the caramel layer is coated with a double or triple-thickness layer of chocolate (not absolutely essential but I like it that way).

Place the tray/baking sheet in the fridge, until the chocolate coating on each piece has fully set.

My verdict: Not identical to the original Rowntrees Cabana Bar, but still absolutely gorgeous. The flavours of the cherries and honey combined with the coconut and slightly salty caramel, with the dark, rich raw chocolate, are divine. These bars are satisfying and energising, and utterly delicious. Interestingly, my husband (who doesn’t like chocolate very much – he’d rather have a Milky Bar) described them as ‘bloody lovely’. And who am I to argue?

I’ve drunk many different juices in the past year. Some good, some bad. Some amazing, some awful. But none as tasty as this one, which I could happily live on for the rest of my life. Seriously.

This sweet, zesty, refreshing natural juice is best enjoyed on a sunny day in beautiful surroundings (my favourite “beautiful surroundings” are my garden, which is why I take so many of my food photos out there these days. I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so you may not think my garden is all that beautiful… but it’s my favourite place in the world!)

So, to make this, you need a juicer, of course – plus the following ingredients:

2 oranges

2 apples (I used Golden Delicious today, but I’ve previously made this with Gala apples which are gorgeous juiced)

1 stick of celery

3 medium to large carrots

Use a potato peeler to peel the oranges. You want to leave as much pith on as possible. It doesn’t matter if a bit of the outer peel remains, just don’t overdo it or the juice will be too zesty.

Juice the oranges on your juicer’s slow speed.

Then juice the apples, celery and carrots on high speed.

Stir well and serve in a pint glass (or if you’re feeling generous, split it with a friend).

After completing last week’s Big Juice Spring Clean (five days of nothing but juice – lost 7lbs, yay!) I found I had quite a lot of ingredients left over, unexpectedly. I could of course have just juiced them all; but having had five days without solid food, my tastebuds were desperate for something delicious and solid for a change. The first recipe I created was a lovely rainbow courgetti, but there were still plenty of leftovers to warrant a second recipe… and in fact a third recipe, which I’ll share in a couple of days’ time.

It didn’t take much effort to come up with this recipe, if I’m honest… I love all sorts of Asian food, from delicately spiced Thai dishes to fairly hot Indian curries, with a bit of Chinese and Vietnamese along the way… so once I took a look in the fridge and saw what was available, this soup was rather a no-brainer!

I had roast chicken and salad for dinner, the night after the detox ended, and there was a little chicken left over as well as a bunch of veg from the detox itself. Now, if you’re a vegetarian, you can omit the chicken from this soup, and use vegetable stock instead of chicken stock. And if you’re a vegan, you can leave out the egg too. I’m sure the flavour will be just as good if you make this a vegan soup – it just happens that I really enjoy the flavour of chicken, and I love Chinese soups with egg stirred through, so that’s what inspired this recipe

Heat the oil and fry the onions and mushrooms until the onions have softened.

Add the broccoli, carrots, greens/kale and sugarsnap peas. Stir well and add the lemongrass, ginger and garlic.

Add the chicken stock and bring to the boil, stirring occasionally. Once the soup is boiling, turn the heat down a little and simmer for 5 minutes.

Add the asparagus and chicken, and cook for another five minutes.

Stir in the sweetcorn and desiccated coconut. Season with the salt and pepper to taste.

Finally, drizzle the beaten egg into the soup – the egg should set pretty much immediately. The soup is now ready to serve.

I found I got two very generous portions from this recipe – enough for two hearty lunches. If you were serving this as a starter at a dinner party (and yes, I really believe it’s tasty enough to be served at a dinner party!) then you’d squeeze four starter-sized portions out of this recipe.

I ate half of this for lunch today – can’t wait until tomorrow lunchtime when I get to eat the other half – yay!

Having just completed Jason Vale’s Big Juice Spring Clean (and losing 7lbs in 5 days, despite only a minimum amount of exercise and not quite finishing due to an upset tummy that left me eating rye toast and Marmite instead of my final juice – so yay to that) I found I had a few bits and pieces of ingredients left over.

What could I do with these leftover ingredients to stop them going to waste? Hmm. Well, three recipes immediately sprang to mind, so here’s the first (the second and third will follow over the next couple of days).

I don’t actually like cooked courgette – I don’t like the texture and I’m not keen on the flavour. But raw, that’s a whole different kettle of fish (or kettle of courgette, I suppose).

I’ve had my spiraliser for over a year now, and don’t really use it that often – so this was a good opportunity to give it a good workout, and create a healthy, filling lunch that literally took somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes to make. Couldn’t be simpler!

If you don’t have a spiraliser, you could instead use a vegetable peeler to peel your courgette into thin strips, like tagliatelle. At which point this recipe becomes ‘courgiatelle’ instead of ‘courgetti’, but let’s not waste time arguing semantics I do recommend buying one though – you can do a lot of fun things with it, like curly fries (I’ve done these before, coated in spices and a little oil and baked in the oven – really tasty).

What I love about this recipe – apart from how quick it was to make – is the beautiful colours. We should aim to eat rainbow foods wherever possible, because a variety of colours in our food is very healthy – this recipe certainly ticks that box!

Anyhoo – enough gassing, and on with the recipe. Makes enough for one person.

1 medium courgette (zucchini) – topped, tailed and peeled

1tsp good oil (I used hemp oil but you could use flax oil or a good extra virgin olive oil)

1tbsp mixed seeds (use whatever you like or have in the cupboard; I used sunflower, pumpkin, hemp and black sesame seeds)

Balsamic vinegar, to taste

Spiralise the courgette and place in the bowl you’ll be eating from (less washing up – yay!)

Add the oil, salt and pepper and garlic. Rub the oil and seasoning into the courgette well (this helps give it a ‘floppy’ texture, in keeping with cooked spaghetti). Add the basil and spinach and mix well into the courgetti.

Pour the juice into your blender jug and add the mango chunks and banana. Halve the passion fruits and using a spoon, scrape out the seeds into the blender and discard the skins.

Blend the mixture until all mango and banana pieces are completely liquidised. You need 6 cups of liquid in total, so if you’re a bit short, just juice another apple or orange and keep adding to the mix until you have 6 cups.

Pour the juice into a large sealable container (a Tupperware box or a Pyrex dish with a plastic lid, for example) and pour in the chia seeds and purple corn extract. Stir well (you’ll probably need to stir for 5-10 minutes for all the chia seed to be coated in juice, and for the purple corn extract to be fully mixed in).

Put a lid on the container and refrigerate for 2 hours. Stir regularly while it’s cooling (every half an hour, say).

This recipe is my “Sabina cake mark II” – my friend Sabina had asked what else some of the superfoods in my ‘Come on, Dover!‘ smoothie recipe could be used for, so I endeavoured to create a couple of recipes these superfoods would work in.

The original idea was to make a cake that would be something between a Dundee cake and a fruit cake. But once the ingredients were mixed, the mixture felt as if it would benefit from being dehydrated, so I decided to cut it into ‘bars’ so they’d dehydrate faster.

The result? A really delicious snack that tastes naughty but is full of goodness, and is surprisingly filling and satisfying. I really can’t get enough of these at the moment; this is the second batch I’ve made in under a week, and they’re so tasty, even my husband is loving them. Result!

This is a pretty simple recipe. The cake bars shouldn’t take more than an hour to mix up, though you do need to allow 4 hours soaking time for the almonds.

This is a dehydrator recipe, but if you don’t have one you could try cooking the bars in your oven at its lowest temperature, with the door open, for a short while (I’ve not tested this so I can’t tell you how long you’d have to bake them for). Of course, they won’t be as nutritious if you cook them instead of dehydrating them – but I’d imagine they’d taste more or less the same.

A by-product of this recipe is the pint of almond milk you’ll be left with after making the almond pulp. Put this in the fridge for a few hours then blend with some cacao and your favourite healthy sweetener for a delicious, healthy, chocolate shake (or if you’re not into chocolate, use raspberries or strawberries – yum!)

For the almond pulp/milk

Place all the ingredients in your blender, and blend until the almonds have turned into the tiniest crumbs possible. Place your nut milk bag into a suitable jug, securing the elasticated neck over the top of the jug. Pour the milk from the blender into the bag, carefully lift the bag up from its neck, and gently squeeze. The aim is to end up with a pulp that’s as dry as you can get it by squeezing alone, so plenty of patience and some firmer squeezing will be needed – but don’t squeeze so hard that the seams of the bag burst! Place the barely-damp pulp into a large mixing bowl, ready for starting the cake part of the recipe. Refrigerate the milk for future use (lasts a few days in the fridge) – there will be a recipe for raw almond milk ice cream appearing here soon, so keep an eye out for that!

Place all the ingredients together in a large mixing bowl and, using your hands, mix well. Really squish those ingredients together! You should end up with a big lump of dough that has a texture similar to Play Doh.

The ingredients after mixing: grown-up Play Doh!

Put the dough onto a Paraflexx sheet on one of your radiator trays. Using your hands, squish it out into a square, approximately 1.5-2cm thick.

Squish the dough into a square, about 1.5-2cm thick

Cut the square into four rows of four pieces, and move the pieces slightly apart to allow air to circulate between them in the dehydrator.

The dough makes 16 cake bars

Dehydrate at 145F for an hour. Flip the cake bars and dehydrate at 105F for 4 hours. Allow to cool and store in an airtight container.

When I posted a variation of my ‘Come on, Dover!’ superfood smoothie recipe to the Inspired by Jason Vale Facebook Group a couple of weeks ago, one of my friends there – Sabina – asked what else these superfoods could be used in. I promised to come up with a couple of recipes, and this is the first of them.

“Sabina cake mark 1,” as I’ve been calling it, is a moist, crumbly raw walnut loaf with a rich, creamy frosting that can be optionally flavoured with coffee (or another good quality flavouring of your choice). If you don’t have the superfoods (baobab, camu-camu powder and purple corn extract) and don’t want to buy them, simply leave them out – they don’t really affect the flavour of the cake, they’re just there for their nutritional value.

The frosting is actually a slightly modified version of the frosting Russell James uses in his carrot and orange cake recipe (which is a wonderful cake, by the way – highly recommended).

You don’t need a dehydrator for this recipe, but there are a couple of other pieces of equipment you’ll need – namely, a nut milk bag, a blender, and some accurate measuring cups and spoons (I have several sets of measuring cups and spoons, in different colours and materials – many raw recipes are measured by the cup, rather than by weight, so they’re handy things to have).

The cashews and almonds (but not the walnuts) will need soaking before use (times given below).

A by-product of this recipe is the pint of almond milk you’ll be left with after making the almond pulp. Put this in the fridge for a few hours then blend with some cacao and your favourite healthy sweetener for a delicious, healthy, chocolate shake (or if you’re not into chocolate, use raspberries or strawberries – yum!)

For the almond pulp/milk

Place all the ingredients in your blender, and blend until the almonds have turned into the tiniest crumbs possible. Place your nut milk bag into a suitable jug, securing the elasticated neck over the top of the jug. Pour the milk from the blender into the bag, carefully lift the bag up from its neck, and gently squeeze. The aim is to end up with a pulp that’s as dry as you can get it by squeezing alone, so plenty of patience and some firmer squeezing will be needed – but don’t squeeze so hard that the seams of the bag burst! Place the barely-damp pulp into a large mixing bowl, ready for starting the cake part of the recipe. Refrigerate the milk for future use (lasts a few days in the fridge).

For the cake

Almond pulp as described above

1 cup of very finely grated parsnip (don’t drain off any juice that accumulates – it helps make the cake moist)

Place all the ingredients except the walnuts and sultanas into a large mixing bowl. Using your hands, mix everything together. Use your fingers to rub the mixture together, to form a breadcrumb/crumble-like consistency.

Add the crushed walnuts (you can just crush them between your fingers as you put them into the bowl) and the sultanas. Mix through thoroughly.

To assemble

Line a loaf tin with cling film. Press half the cake mixture into the lined tin, gently but firmly (you want the cake to have a fairly loose consistency, but at the same time you don’t want it to turn into crumbs when you turn it out of the tin).

Use half the frosting mixture to form a layer on top of the bottom layer of cake, then add the remainder of the cake mixture and press in as before.

Tun the tin upside down on a plate or board and carefully lift it, leaving behind the cling film-covered cake. Remove the cling film.

Into the remaining frosting, add your coffee essence or other preferred flavouring (if using) and mix well. Spread the frosting onto the top of the cake and pop into the fridge for an hour or so to firm up.

Final step: stuff your face!

I made this last night and had a slice for breakfast this morning. It’s very filling and VERY tasty! Sweet enough but not sickly sweet – perfect!